The present disclosure relates to a method to activate print nozzles of an inkjet printer (e.g. inkjet printer) as well as a printer having an inkjet print head configured to execute such a method.
Inkjet printers can be used in digital high-capacity printing. The use of a printer that can print to at least 10 pages of DIN A4 size per second is understood as high-capacity printing. However, printers for high-capacity printing may also be designed for higher print speeds, for example at least 30 pages of DIN A4 per second, and in particular at least 50 pages of DIN A4 per second.
Inkjet printers for digital high-capacity printing include a print head with a plurality of print nozzles. Such a print head may have several thousand print nozzles, for example. A separate actuator is associated with each print nozzle. This actuator acts as a small pump, upon the activation of which a pressure pulse is exerted on the ink located in the supply line of the print nozzle so that a droplet of ink is ejected from the respective print nozzle.
The printers often have a cleaning device to clean the print head, with which the print head may be wiped off automatically with a wiping device. For this, the surface of the print head is wetted with additional ink so that, upon wiping off the print head, dried residues of previous printing processes on the print head are dissolved and carried along by the liquid ink. Such a cleaning process interrupts the production and increases the ink consumption.
Such a cleaning of the print head must be performed if the print quality decreases. After a certain operating duration, inkjet printers may develop streaking. In particular, at high print capacity (i.e. at high print speed), the print quality decreases rapidly so that, for example, the printing operation must be interrupted every two hours to clean the print heads.
The exemplary embodiments of the present disclosure will be described with reference to the accompanying drawings.